Posts Tagged ‘baorders’

So here’s the deal – you’ve got sail boarders going back and forth from Crissy Field to Horseshoe Cove at the same time you have humpback whales going up and down getting sardines.

This person knows that whales are in this area these days. If you see a whale going down, you can guess that it will pop up again in about the same area in about two minutes.

So if there’s a collision, this isn’t necessarily running into whales on purpose, which seems to what’s worrying some in Frisco these days.

Same thing for kite boarders

This here is from Fort Point on a foggy evening:

These sail boaters are more or less hanging out with the whales, going back and forth in a small area between Alcatraz and the GGB:

They’re on their own whale watching tour:

But I didn’t see any whale strikes on this day.

Now, back up to the bridge, this was the last time I was up there. This 40 foot sailboat had just tacked going upwind and then up comes a whale. The boat hit the whale but it was more of a glancing blow. The boaters weren’t aiming for the whale as they couldn’t even see it until after they hit it – it’s just something that happens.

VisionZero is a governmental promise that nobody will ever get injured / killed in transportation accidents in San Francisco from 2024 to eternity. IMO it’s shameful to promote the idea that there’s any kind of chance of this actually occurring IRL – somehow the politics of the situation has people doing this, oh well.

But what about whales? If you want to live in a world without whales getting hit by watercraft, you’d need to ban watercraft from transiting the Golden Gate when the whales are around. That would be Vision Zer whale strikes, I don’t think that’s practical.

The whale above did fine. It floated about for a while and then went back to fishing.

So I don’t know. Let’s be careful out there, but these types of incidents are inevitable when you have so many whales about in the summertime…